Monica Miller

Monica L. Miller is Chair and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. A leading voice in Black fashion and dress studies, Monica also teaches and writes about Black literature, art, performance, and contemporary Black European culture and politics.  

She is the Guest Curator of the critically acclaimed Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the spring 2025 Costume Institute exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a co-author and editor of the accompanying exhibition catalog. Superfine was inspired by her book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an outstanding scholarly study of Black American literature or culture, as awarded by the Modern Language Association.  Her work explains how people of color have used clothing and style to question, challenge, and hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She argues that style and aesthetics are integral parts of cultural politics and an index to power.

Professor Miller earned her PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from Dartmouth College. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. 

In addition to her ongoing work on Black fashion and dress cultures, Monica is an expert on the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary Black art and artists.

Professor Miller’s most recent writing and speaking concerns Black fashion and dress cultures, the Harlem Renaissance, contemporary Black art and artists, and Black feminist writers and artists. She was a faculty expert for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s award-winning podcast, Harlem is Everywhere, produced as part of the 2024 exhibition Harlem Renaissance and TransAtlantic Modernism, and was a consultant for the upcoming exhibition The Gay Harlem Renaissance at The New York Historical. Other exhibition consultancies include Undercover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the The New York Historical, Africa Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Fresh, Fly and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip-Hop Style at the Museum at FIT; she wrote essays for the latter two exhibition catalogs. At Barnard, Monica is the resident expert on writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, the College’s first Black alum, and is spearheading the Zora Neale Hurston Centennial there, a celebration of Hurston’s matriculation and graduation from Barnard (2025-2028) and 100 Years of Black Students at Barnard. She is also the editor of two issues of The Scholar & Feminist on Hurston and her life and legacy, as well as an issue on Ntozake Shange, fellow Black feminist icon (and Barnard alum).  

Monica’s work in Black European studies uses fiction, poetry, film, and art to examine Black identities historically present and emerging in places that claim colorblindness and colonial and imperial amnesia, and in which there is little vocabulary for talking about race and Blackness. Monica’s work in Sweden emerges from being a sometime resident and frequent visitor to Sweden over the last 25 years. Her current book project Blackness Swedish Style: Race and the Rhizomatics of Being considers cultural production by the emerging black community in Sweden and its connection to a dynamic, experimental Black otherwiseness that is developing there. Most recently, she co-wrote, with Nana Osei-Kofi, the introduction to the translation of AfroNorwegian artist Camara Joof’s groundbreaking memoir on Blackness and belonging in Scandinavia, I Talk About It All the Time.

For more on Monica, please see her website. For more on Superfine, please see The Met’s Costume Institute’s site for the exhibition.

TOPICS: Race, History, Women & Girls of Color